Baca was asked about the coins at a deposition last year. He said he was aware that Tanaka was part of the group, but that the coin was the brainchild of someone else.
"I'm not one who cares about smoking and coins," Baca said.
David Plunkert
Ted Soqui
“You ever see a liberal mom or dad who lets
their kids do everything? That’s what Baca
is,” Robert Olmsted says of Sheriff Lee Baca,
pictured.
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Tanaka declined to comment for this story.
As he consolidated control of the department, Tanaka began attending staff meetings in the jails and at patrol stations around the county, where he shared his hard-nosed philosophy.
In a meeting at the Norwalk station in 2009, he told a group of supervisors, "You need to let deputies do their job out there, they have a tough job," according to testimony from Patrick Maxwell, the station captain, before the Citizens Commission on Jail Violence. "You need to allow the deputies to work in the gray area."
As Maxwell understood it, Tanaka was encouraging his staff to go "outside policy and outside the law." He gave the same speech in other stations. "Working the gray" became his signature phrase.
In a briefing at Century station, Tanaka told deputies they needed "to function right on the edge of the line," according to a memo by Stephen Roller, the station captain. He also said they "need to be very aggressive in their approach to dealing with gang members."
Tanaka said that some supervisors were "hasty" in putting misconduct cases on their deputies. He said he would be checking to see which captains put the most cases on their deputies and "he would be putting a case on them."
He also expressed hostility to the Internal Affairs Bureau. In one meeting, according to Maxwell's testimony, he noted that the department had 45 internal affairs investigators. "In my opinion, that's fucking 44 too many."
In his own testimony before the jails commission, Tanaka gave a rather tortured explanation of his "gray area" remarks. But he did not shy away from his criticisms of Internal Affairs. Most of his testimony was controlled and defensive, but when talking about the plight of accused deputies, he showed rare empathy.
"You leave a cloud hanging over somebody's head. They become less than functional, less than productive," he said. "They are treated in a less-than-respectful manner, in a manner we don't allow our people to treat people in our jails."
That would be pretty bad, judging by the findings of the Citizens Commission on Jail Violence. The commission's report, issued in September, identified a "disturbing mindset" among deputies that promoted inmate assaults as a way of demonstrating "who is running the jails."
That mindset went back to Block's tenure. Baca's new-age bromides had done nothing to stop it. In Men's Central Jail, deputies formed ganglike cliques, which promoted a culture of aggression toward inmates and impunity from supervisors.
Lt. Alfred Gonzales tried to get his bosses to do something about it. "We need to break these deputies up," he told his captain, John Clark, according to his testimony.
In early 2006, Clark agreed and issued a rotation plan. The plan caused an immediate uprising from the deputies. They did not want their assignments changed, and they sent emails protesting the decision all the way up the chain to Tanaka. Without consulting with Clark, Tanaka canceled the plan.
About a week later, Tanaka held a meeting at Men's Central Jail and blasted the supervisors who'd attempted reforms. "How dare a lieutenant refer to deputy sheriffs as gang members!" he screamed, according to Gonzales' recollection. "You supervisors will stay off those floors and let those deputies do what they have to do."
Sgt. Daniel Pollaro, who worked in the jails, was devastated. "I felt like I might as well take my stripes off," he testified. "We hung our heads. It was hurtful, very hurtful, that the Sheriff's Department was coming to something like this."
Captain Clark soon was reassigned, replaced by Robert Olmsted, the captain who would later try to warn Baca about Tanaka. The situation improved.
But when Tanaka promoted him and put Capt. Dan Cruz in charge, things deteriorated again. In 2008 and 2009, statistics showed a spike in violence. Internal reviews of those incidents were often cursory, and often delayed. Michael Bornman, a lieutenant who was assigned to the jails in 2009, said he once opened a drawer and found 32 uncompleted performance reviews dating back a year and a half.
Cruz was the sort of person who wanted to be liked by his deputies. At a Christmas party in 2009, Bornman testified, Cruz toasted his deputies by saying "What do I always tell you?" The deputies answered, "Not in the face!"
"Not in the face!" Cruz repeated — meaning guards shouldn't hit an inmate where it will leave a visible mark.
At one point, Bornman suggested to Cruz that they inform Olmsted, who was Cruz's boss, of the issues they were having in the jail.
"Fuck Bob Olmsted, I don't work for him," Cruz said.
He elaborated: "Lee Baca is my sheriff, but I work for Paul Tanaka."
The jail scandal began to come into public view in December 2010, after a group of Men's Central Jail deputies got into a brawl at their Christmas party. That episode was a surprising breakdown in discipline, and it focused attention on deputy gangs.
